‘Prayers for Likes’ Facebook Sick Baby Scam

The message is a disgraceful scam designed solely to accumulate likes for a Facebook Page and promote the Page further via shares. The baby’s picture was stolen from a personal Facebook profile and is being circulated without the permission of the baby’s parents. Tragically, the baby in the picture passed away just two weeks after she was born. The continued circulation of this message is causing great distress to the baby’s family. If this scam message comes your way, please do not share or like it. And please report the message to Facebook.

According to a message currently being distributed on Facebook, you can offer prayers for a very young baby depicted in an attached photograph just by liking and sharing her image. The message claims that each like equals 1 prayer while sharing the baby’s picture equates to a whopping 100 prayers.

However, liking and sharing the message will do nothing to help the pictured baby. The message is just one more in a long line of sick baby hoaxes that falsely claim that you can help a pictured child by liking and sharing his or her picture. Some claim that money will be donated in exchange for liking and sharing. Others suggest that liking and sharing equate to prayers for the child.

The people who create these messages are motivated purely by greed and care not one iota for the children whose pictures they misuse. The messages are designed to accumulate likes for a particular Facebook Page and to promote the Page further via shares and comments. Facebook Pages with large numbers of likes can be sold on the black market to other unscrupulous Internet marketers and/or used to launch further spam and scam campaigns.

The picture of the baby used in this scam message was stolen from a personal Facebook profile connected to the family and is being used without the permission of her parents.

Tragically, the baby in the picture passed away in April 2014, just two weeks after she was born. The continued circulation of the stolen picture is causing considerable distress to the baby’s family.

Whether or not you believe that prayers can help a sick child is – of course – dependent on your personal belief system. But, the suggestion that interacting with buttons on a social network website can somehow equal specified numbers of prayers is simply absurd. Are we to believe that the Almighty has done a deal with Facebook that makes each share equal to one hundred prayers?

Any message that makes such a claim is sure to be a scam or a hoax.

If this message comes your way, please do not like, share, or comment on the post. This just plays into the hands of the disgusting and immoral people who created it. Those willing to use such disgraceful tactics just to garner likes and promote their Pages are beneath contempt and have no place on our social networks.

Facebook’s response to these fake sick child messages has been reprehensibly inadequate. The company needs to take action that ensures that these scam messages are removed from the network as quickly as possible.

Nevertheless, Facebook has actually removed some of the messages, apparently after they have been reported a number of times. So, please report the scam messages to Facebook.